Anyone thinking about bioprinting with reprap yet?

Perhaps not realistic given the early stage of the project, but maybe reprap could have an extruder head do this sort of stuff a decade from now. Might be worth exploring the possibility of creating crosslinks between the reprap and the medical research community. I can imagine a day when field hospitals might be set up in distressed areas with a need for tissue printing. I suspect a cheap, modular, self replicating, open source design might be just what the doctor ordered. See link below for cheezy youtube video on bio or organ printing.

As someone who has designed and built cell/tissue/DNA printers, I can tell you that the difference between the bioprinters and reprap is basically the print head and the material being "printed". So in theory a reprap could one day do it.

I would try to keep the name reprap out of that field of research if you can because the next thing you know people will be screaming that reprap is being used to kill babies. For some reason the crazy protesters seem to think that anything related to biological research these days involves stem cells.

... i know this clip and some earlier too ... it's not only the price what renders common "organ-printing on demand" useless.

This is not real shape-printing, but more flood specific areas with supporting fluids embedding some floating cells and hope they will settle in the right positions and start growing and spreading.

Some ten years ago i had some crosstalks with scientists from IMM in Mainz how it's best to settle living cells in grids, arrays and slices for medical investigation - there we had some very specific problems and solutions for this and every type of stem-cells have their own behaviour and treatment for correct behaviour

In our body the cells aren't simply "sit .here. and work", but there is an extreme complex communication between the cells, their neighbours and the 'central intelligence' in our brainstem - that's involving chemistry, hormons, electricity, fast frequencies and elf and some holographic 'crossfire' with coherent 'bio-photons' from all around in the body too ...

Actually the scientists can only make some very basic and simple tissues ... when 'building' a new organ like a liver or such, they only can probe a piece of the original organ, try to breed the cells until they form a bigger bulk and place them in the place where they should work - and hope that it works

Far away from "... you lost your kidneys? - No problem, wait an hour and here you have some new ones!"

I think that the guy doing bio printing will use stem cells which would be programmed to be any organ (other than the brain), or any bone. And becuase the stem cells come from the same person needing a new "part", there is no chance of rejection or rejection drugs

Those of us doing bioprinting at the moment, are mostly using epithelial cells which are cheap and easy to harvest and grow. From those cells we can make replacement skin for burn victims and replacement veins and arteries for bypass surgeries. A growing area of research seems to be in making replacement colons as well.

But something like skin that most people consider to be simple, is not so simple. You have to embed micro blood vessels into the skin in the correct place, and still the area will have no feeling because no one has figured out how to do the nerve cell part yet.

For all of the talk about what stems cells may be able to do and what people have done with them so far, using them is still a ways off. Forgettting the possible moral implications of stem cells, the cost to harvest, process, and modify them doesn't make them a good choice for doing bioprinting research with.

In the future, maybe 50 years, it may be possible; but for now we are still taking baby steps with bioprinting.

The interesting thing about stem cells is that they apparently, self differentiate given the right environment.

This is how injecting failing organs with stem cells is considered to be therapeutic. They are influenced by the existing cells such that they self differentiate into the correct cell types for their location. The appropriate genes are tuned on/off and the chemical manufactories make Proteins within the cell. Differentiating the cell into something compatible with it's neighbours.

So stem cells injected into a neighbourhood of liver cells become more liver cells etc etc etc.

It follows then that if you are laying up groups of undifferentiated cells (ie Stem cells) you don't actually need to talk to all of them. Just enough to kick start the process. So long as you have critical mass you should get something like what you want. They are all after all working from the same internally documented design for a full organism.

If you were to lay up a group with nothing to steer the differentiation, I think we fully agree, there is no way you could work out what you would end up with. Bit of a heart, maybe a finger could even be a hair follicle or two. It should be some part/s or other of the full organism that is described in their common DNA.

As to printing whole organs as opposed to sheets of tissue this could be difficult. Necrosis will beat you to it on every occasion unless you have the necessary transport system in place to get oxygen, chemical feed-stocks and all the rest to the cells that are buried in the mass of other cells.

I guess this could be why the trend towards scaffolding up organ sections.

... this is why i mentioned you have to learn 'speaking' with them - ist's not only some specialized cells als neighbours to activate/harmonize them ... it's much more: chemistry, nervous signals, hormones, the ominous 'bio-photons' and maybe something yet unknown, what's informing them what to do at the actual position to be harmonic.

It's the same with cancer - some experiments shows that cancer-cells are normal cells, which are excluded from the normal 'communication' ... or to the contrary - if you manage to restore the normal 'communication', you convert cancer- in normal cells again.

This should be one of the most interesting and complicated task of the next decades - i think, if we manage the 'communication' between cells, we can make much more than with 'simple' genetic engineering - imagine 'reprogramming' the stem-cell of a walnut to form a hinged wooden box instead ... or replace a lost finger simply by 'talking' to a cell in the right position.

Or imagine much more sophisticated tasks: - let a complete house with interiour grow out of a nut ... or a 'live' reprap capable of selfrepair and such

It may be sufficient to lay down some cells and then put a piece of the original organ into the middle of them.

N.B. the differentiated and undifferentiated cells must all be of the same line. i.e. have the same genetic patterning both at cell and mitochondrial levels.

As we have observed all good cells have two important characteristics.

1. Each contains the complete description for their organism.

2. Each can communicate directly and indirectly with its neighbours.

Stem or undifferentiated cells are influenced by their direct communications with their neighbours (normaly chemical) and by their indirect communication with their neighbours (Also though to be chemical). To differentiation ie become more suited to a given task.

As you suggested viktor cancer is a thing of two parts, one the cells may or may not loose communication and the second they divide or replicate in an uncontrolled manner. Which one is causal and which one if not both are symptomatic, I have no idea. Cancer does like a lot of lumped disorders appear to be several quite different patterns of dysfunction collected under one heading.

As for self replicating dwellings, machinery et all this is eminently doable when we have the right level of capability and technology. Which as you quite rightly point out we have'nt. Yet.

Just for fun what more do you guys think we need in terms of technological development to achieve directed bio development...... ??

Hi!
I have worked on biodegadeable, extruded composite materials during my thesis and have co-develeopped a technique to prepare tissue engineering material. We have used Starch,PLA,PHB,PCL as substrate material.
One of our approaches was electrospinning of nanofibres and one was co-extrusion of two inmiscible polymers where one was soluble in a kind of solvent and one was not. After extraction of the soluble polymer, a very fine network of biodegradeable compund was left over. Preferably the solvent had to be as non-toxic as possible in order to have cells grow on it, The solvent of choice would be water in this case. The best water-soluble polymer turned out to be PVA and was also quite inmiscible with the given biopolymers.
The problem is, that the network of biopolymer inside the 2nd polymers matrix does only form by mechanical stress in liquid phase, i.e. by pulling the thread faster than the nozzle output.
If this technique could be trnansferred to the mendel, it would be a fascinating approach.

Rater than printing up organs what about protein. IE Meat on demand. Foodstuffs.

This is probably doable as would be simpler. Could maybe be done as sheets of meet then reprocessed into mince etc. Or slices to go.

Meat is after all just a simpler organ.

Being stem cells derived from an animal source (yeah I will probably get flamed by AR crazies) it takes away the People issues. And perhaps arguably will result in a better life for animals as they will no longer be farmed intensively for food stuffs. (Maybe won't get flamed by AR crazies)

Given Craign Venters work on Synthetic Organisms (Synthia) a non animal source with a considerably simplified genome is probably doable some time soon.

Re long distance space travel. Having a way to "Make" food would be very useful. Keeping livels tock is very wasteful of resources.